The Letters

Alongside the rhymed sayings, St. Ambrose of Optina conducted a vast ministry of spiritual direction by correspondence — answering, with the help of his cell-attendants, tens of letters every day to laypeople and to nuns, and leaving collections that have become a classic of Russian spiritual counsel. This file surveys the published correspondence (the Russian Sretensky and other collections to worldly persons and to monastics, and the English selections), its recurring themes — anxiety answered by trust in providence, direction given in small steps, marriage and family counsel, and the refusal of a one-size spirituality — and sets it beside the correspondence of his teacher Macarius and of Sts. Theophan the Recluse and Ignatius Brianchaninov.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Correspondence as a Form of Eldership

Ambrose’s letters were not a literary sideline but a principal channel of his eldership, and after 1846 a physically necessary one. Confined for much of his life to his cell and often to his bed by the illness that never left him (see The Invalid Elder), he reached the Russia that could not come to Optina through the post. He had first entered this work as a junior member of Elder Macarius’ circle, helping the older elder answer his correspondence; the OCA Life records that “Father Ambrose began to help Elder Macarius with his correspondence” and, once an elder in his own right, “would dictate replies to the many letters he received every day” (Orthodox Church in America, Venerable Ambrose of Optina). The dictation is itself significant: the letters carry the cadence of spoken counsel, terse and proverbial, the same voice as the rhymed sayings (see The Rhymed Wisdom).

The volume was extraordinary — “tens of letters and dozens of visitors” daily, handled with the help of cell-attendants who read the incoming mail aloud and wrote down his replies (Mileant, Elder Ambrose of Optina). His correspondents ran the whole range of Russian society, from peasant widows to the writers and thinkers who sought him out (the elder’s circle of correspondents and visitors included Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyov, and Leontiev; Mileant). A particular and growing share of the correspondence was directed to women’s monastic communities, above all to the convent at Shamordino, twelve versts from Optina, which Ambrose founded in 1884 and filled with “poor and destitute women — widows, orphans, the blind, lame and sick” (Mileant; Serbian Orthodox Church, St. Ambrose of Optina: Spiritual Care of Monastics and Laypeople).

The Published Collections

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors gathered the surviving letters into two broad bodies, reflecting the two halves of his correspondence:

Letters to laypeople / worldly persons — the Sobranie pisem optinskogo startsa ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiya k mirskim osobam (Collection of Letters of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose to Worldly Persons), the classic gathering of his counsel to those living in the world.
Letters to monastics — a parallel body addressed to nuns and monks, much of it to the Shamordino sisters and other women’s communities.

These have been repeatedly reprinted; a widely used modern Russian selection is Umudryaysya i smiryaysya: Pis’ma o dukhovnoy zhizni (“Grow Wise and Be Humbled: Letters on the Spiritual Life,” Sretensky Monastery, Moscow, 2006). In English the letters survive chiefly in selections rather than a complete edition: Archpriest Sergius Chetverikov’s biography Elder Ambrose of Optina (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press) quotes the correspondence extensively, and the journal Orthodox America ran a translated series, “Letters of Spiritual Counsel,” numbering the individual letters (e.g., Letters XXIX, LXXXIII) (roca.org, Letters of Spiritual Counsel by Elder Ambrose of Optina). As with the sayings, the discipline of this collection is to quote from these published letters where the wording is fixed in print, and to mark as oral-tradition counsel anything carried only in the Lives (see Methodology §2.4).

The Themes

Anxiety Answered by Providence

The largest single current in the letters is the steadying of anxious souls. Ambrose’s answer to worry was never reassurance about circumstances but a relocation of trust: “if you trust in God’s Providence and hope in God’s omnipotent assistance, then you will not meet with such problems as you suppose” (St. Ambrose, in Orthodox America, “Letters of Spiritual Counsel”). He read affliction itself as providential pedagogy rather than abandonment — “The All-good Lord, in His infinitely wise Providence… [brings] about unexpected deprivations and sorrow, in order that we might come to our senses and turn our spiritual gaze to the acquisition of good things which are not transitory but eternal” (Letter LXXXIII, Orthodox America) — and counseled receiving God’s will “not only un-murmuringly but with gratitude,” reading sorrows as evidence of divine sonship rather than rejection (roca.org). To the bereaved he wrote with the same logic: a mother deprived of her son “in the future life… will again be able to see him and to be joined with him” (Letter LXXXIII, Orthodox America), grief redirected toward commemoration and almsgiving rather than crushed.

Small Steps

Ambrose refused to load souls with programs they could not carry. His direction characteristically reduced the spiritual life to the next small, possible act, fenced about with patience: “Learn, and begin by being patient with the disappointments that you find and meet” (Mileant). He paired patience with humility as the two things that “spare you from much evil” (roca.org), and met the temptation to suspect others with the curt redirection: do not weigh up people’s deeds or ask “why is it so, why this?” but say only, “What is that to me?” (St. Ambrose, Umudryaysya i smiryaysya; cf. ijov.wordpress.com translation). The same letters warn to “stay away from suspiciousness as from fire, for the enemy of the human race catches people in his net by this” (Umudryaysya i smiryaysya). The method is incremental: not the conquest of a passion at a stroke but the patient bearing of the day’s small irritations, which is how the elder taught that larger virtue is in fact built.

Marriage and Family Counsel

Because so many of his correspondents lived in the world, the letters are full of concrete domestic direction — on the rearing of children, the bearing of family sorrows, the duties of station — given without the suspicion of marriage that a narrower asceticism might bring. He took the smallest household trouble seriously: the often-told account of the woman who grieved over her dying turkeys, whom Ambrose did not wave away but questioned, instructed in their feeding, and blessed — after which the birds recovered — is preserved precisely because it shows the elder’s conviction that “insignificant matters do not exist” for the soul that brings them in faith (Mileant). The principle behind the family counsel is that holiness is worked out in one’s actual condition: he pointed those who pleaded their circumstances to the prophet Samuel, raised among the debauched sons of Eli “yet [who] preserved himself and was a great prophet” (Mileant) — sanctity is possible exactly where one stands.

The Refusal of a One-Size Spirituality

What unites the correspondence is a studied refusal to give the same answer twice. The counsel to a nun under obedience is not the counsel to a married woman in the world; the rule given to a robust soul is not the rule given to a fearful one. Ambrose tailored a brief, achievable prayer-rule — including certain Psalms of David which, he said from experience, “strengthened the enfeebled spirit and scattered the enemy’s attacks” — to the particular souls who came to him in trial, rather than imposing a uniform discipline (roca.org). This discernment of persons (rassuzhdenie) is the mark of genuine eldership, and it is the chief reason his letters resist abridgement into a system: each was cut to fit a single soul.

Comparison: Macarius, Theophan, Ignatius

Ambrose’s correspondence stands inside a great century of Russian spiritual direction by letter, and gains by comparison with the three figures nearest him.

His own teacher, Elder Macarius (1788–1860), was the immediate model: it was at Macarius’ side, answering Macarius’ mail, that Ambrose learned the craft (see The Optina Editions). The Optina line ran from Macarius’ letters to Ambrose’s, the disciple carrying forward the master’s manner of brief, patristically-grounded, person-specific reply.

St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) offers the closest parallel and a revealing contrast. Theophan likewise ran a vast ministry by correspondence from his reclusion at Vysha, answering “thousands of letters from people of all stations… on prayer, the passions, family life, illness, temptation,” and his counsel is likewise marked by “practicality,” “balance,” and “accessibility” (see Sts. Theophan and Ignatius Brianchaninov). But Theophan, the former bishop and academic, wrote as a systematic theologian of the inner life, building toward treatises like The Path to Salvation; Ambrose, the elder besieged by pilgrims, wrote in fragments, proverbs, and jokes, never assembling a system. Theophan instructs; Ambrose directs. The one produced the Russian Dobrotolubie; the other produced the Russia of pilgrims who carried his rhymes home.

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807–1867), the third of the great nineteenth-century directors, wrote with a more austere and warning emphasis — on the discernment of spirits and the dangers of prelest (spiritual delusion). Set beside Ignatius’ severity, Ambrose’s letters are warmer and more domestic, more apt to lift a soul with a jest than to brace it with a warning — though both stand on the same Philokalic ground that Optina had put into Russian. Together the four — Macarius, Ambrose, Theophan, Ignatius — constitute the golden age of Orthodox spiritual direction by correspondence, and Ambrose is its most beloved voice precisely because he is its least systematic and most personal.

References

St. Ambrose of Optina. Sobranie pisem optinskogo startsa ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiya k mirskim osobam [Collection of Letters of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose to Worldly Persons]. Optina / reprints.
St. Ambrose of Optina. Umudryaysya i smiryaysya: Pis’ma o dukhovnoy zhizni [Grow Wise and Be Humbled: Letters on the Spiritual Life]. Moscow: Sretensky Monastery, 2006.
“Letters of Spiritual Counsel by Elder Ambrose of Optina.” Orthodox America (roca.org), Vol. X, Issue 96 (numbered letters, incl. XXIX and LXXXIII). (Source of the providence/afflictions excerpts and the prayer-rule note.)
Chetverikov, Sergius (Archpriest). Elder Ambrose of Optina. Platina, CA / Crestwood, NY: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. (Quotes the correspondence extensively.)
Mileant, Bishop Alexander. Elder Ambrose of Optina (booklet). fatheralexander.org. (Source for the daily volume of letters, the Samuel and turkey counsels, the “what is that to me?” redirection, and the Shamordino correspondence.)
Venerable Ambrose of Optina. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, October 10. (Source for his assisting Macarius’ correspondence and dictating daily replies.)
“St. Ambrose of Optina: Spiritual Care of Monastics and Laypeople.” Serbian Orthodox Church (arhiva.spc.rs). (Source for Shamordino and the two-sided ministry.)
Agapit (Belovidov), Schemarchimandrite. Zhizneopisanie… ieroskhimonakha Amvrosiya. The standard nineteenth-century Life (reprint, Sretensky Monastery, 2010).